Lowlight Tourer progress
It's often said about classic cars that 'there was much more rust than I had hoped!' This has certainly been the case with the doors, wings, bootlid and even the bonnet of the 1950 Minor Lowlight Tourer. Sorting this out has, of course, also taken much longer than expected, but we must be close to packing away the welder and angle grinder, having a massive clear up and then starting to paint. It's a noisy, dirty stage we will be glad to have out of the way.
As a reminder, we bought this unseen off ebay some time ago. It looked pretty rusty in the pictures and was much worse when it arrived; if it hadn't been for the Covid lockdowns, we would never have found time to repair it. The story the car came with was that it was rescued from a Californian scrapyard about 25 years ago, then sat outside in the rain in South Wales for nearly 20 years. This caused it to rust in some unusual places; for example, the bonnet was wafer thin everywhere. Luckily, when I was a student in London we bought a lowlight bonnet very cheaply as a spare. This lived in my university house for about 18 months, where it drew much attention. This was much better than the one that came with the tourer, although the brace inside was crumbling. Strangely the one on the scrap bonnet was fine, so this was carefully removed and swapped over.
Both doors needed welding. We were able to patch the nearside one, but the driver's door needed the full works. Welding doors has to be done carefully. It's easy to distort the door as I have found out the hard way, but numerous trial fittings and tack welds ensured it fitted nicely. I do wonder if using the original doors helped. I’ve often found when changing doors you can run into trouble, even if nominally they are all the same.
The boot lid repairs proved interesting. At some time the car has had a whack in the back and although we had replaced and straightened the lower part of the boot aperture and thought this was OK, no amount of fiddling would get the lid to fit with an even gap. After much measuring and comparison, we came to the conclusion the lower left side of the aperture was distorted. It did not seem viable to try to beat the panel into shape, so we resorted to building up the affected area with weld then grinding it smooth, and this has solved the problem.
When welding up the chassis of the car, the priority was to stabilize the body. This has meant that there are some welds which needed a bit of tidying up. I always knew we could come back to this later, and now we have tipped the car on its side to partially smooth some of the more knobbly welds down. It's not possible to disguise the vast amount of welding, but some localised angle grinding has made it look much neater.
One of the jobs I’ve thankfully not had to lead on is grit-blasting. Dad has got a hobby bottle blaster and has been gradually blasting all the panels. There's nothing like this to get rust off, although it's a
messy, dusty process. To speed blasting up we used paint stripper, water based this time. It's surprisingly effective, and although slower than the nasty stuff, it is much nicer to use.
I suppose everyone knows how, just before going into production, the Morris Minor was widened by four inches. Apparently a prototype was sawn in half and adjusted. This shows up in several places – the raised bonnet section which remained a feature of the Morris Minor throughout production, but most obviously in the bumpers of the early cars. These have a painted metal finisher to separate the two halves, something which changed after two years when the full-width bumper was introduced. This means early bumpers are quite rare and made of five pieces, which must have been terribly inefficient in the factory – I imagine someone sawing all the narrow bumpers in half! The centre finisher was missing from my front bumper, and if they appear for sale then people want a fortune for them. I had one from the rear bumper and checked if it fitted the front. Dad, who is a much more skilful panel maker than me, carefully made me one, copying the starting handle hole from my 1950 Morris Minor saloon.
Turning to paint, I have bought some Thames Blue engine enamel to paint the floors and engine bay. It’s an unusual colour that doesn't photograph quite as it appears to the naked eye. (The photos look more turquoise.) It wasn't quite what we were expecting. We painted the scrap bonnet with it, but a small square of paint doesn't give a good representation of how it will look on a car. There is not much choice though, because Morris Lowlights only came in eight colours. The black it left the factory in doesn't appeal and would show every imperfection. The car is from June 1950, which was the changeover year from four early colours to four later ones. Closely questioning the chassis number and build date shows that Thames Blue was introduced in September 1950, but it’s my car! I didn’t fancy another Romain Green car or a dull grey, and there are already a lot of Maroon Lowlight Tourers. I wanted something different. Thames Blue was introduced near the end of the production of lowlights, and I've never seen a surviving tourer in this colour, although a highlight Series MM tourer comes to mind. It may be quite unique, (though having written this, no doubt someone will send in a photo telling me this isn’t the case!). Next month, perhaps we’ll have some paint on the body and some Thames Blue under the bonnet?